Embracing Chaos, part 1
Consider this part one of several posts on my thoughts of the art of embracing chaos.
Don’t let the books fool you. The construction of custom software is an unmastered and volatile cesspool of chaos. I don’t adhere to the belief that there is a perfect methodology or process that will work for every project… as I’m sure many of you don’t.
Unlike bowling, you’ll never achieve a perfect score. Even in bowling, It’s unlikely that anybody will learn how to bowl a perfect score and do so on every game for the rest of their career.
You’ll never meet every expectation that a client has on every project.
You’ll never meet every expectation that a user has when they interact with your application.
Expectations are an interesting thing.
Your project might get widely adopted and embraced, but you’re still trying to control chaos.
It’s chaos. Pure chaos1.
So, why do we bother? Why do we try so hard when the odds aren’t in our favor?
To be continued…
Related Posts:
1 Chaos Theory, Wikipedia
Embracing Failure, part 1 3
I’m currently reading To Engineer is Human, by Henry Petroski and found the following applicable to software development and managing client and customer expectations.
“As much as it is human to make mistakes, it is also human to want to avoid them. Murphy’s Law, holding that anything that can go wrong will, is not a law of nature but a joke. All the light bulbs that last until we tire of the lamp, all the shoelaces that outlast their shoes, all the automobiles that give trouble-free service until they are traded in have the last laugh on Murphy. Just as he will not outlive his law, so nothing manufactured can be or is expected to last forever. Once we recognize this elementary fact, the possibility of a machine or a building being as near to perfect for its designed lifetime as its creators may strive to be for theirs is not only a realistic goal but also a reasonable expectation for consumers. It is only when we set ourselves such an unrealistic goal as buying a shoelace that will never break, inventing a perpetual motion machine, or building a vehicle that will never break down that we appear to be fools and not rational beings.”
I’m sure that most of us are guilty of having high expectations for products that we purchased. (why does my ipod screen scratch so easily when in my pocket?) We also set high expectations for the code that we develop, which is why we (hopefully) continue to refine our process. We’re bound to time and budget constraints, which often prevent us from testing every imaginable edge case. Given our constraints, problems are almost always going to arise. It’s no wonder that we see Test-Driven Development as an important part of a healthy development process. We want to catch our failures as early as possible.
Our clients often have high expectations and it’s almost always very reasonable. That’s not to say that some clients will not have highly irrational expectations. It’s our job to manage these expectations as best as possible.
Do we mislead our clients by convincing them that our TDD/BDD process is going to prevent any bugs from creeping from the woodwork after the development cycle is finished?
“I thought that we paid you to fully test the code?”
Really… is that even possible? Can we predict (and test) every possible interaction within an application? Highly unlikely.
What we can do is plan for and embrace failure. We can help our clients understand that almost every application needs to be maintained after it’s initial development cycle. Bugs are inevitable and there needs to be a clear process for handling them.
Perhaps I’m abusing the bug fixing process by calling it a failure… but I’ve also found that yes… many bugs are due to failure. Whether that be a failure to specify application behavior, a failure to understand the project goals, a failure in communication, ...or maybe a failure in our software architecture. We’re constantly failing.. and it’s okay!
IT’S OKAY TO FAIL! (some of the time…)
“No one wants to learn by mistakes, but we cannot learn enough from successes to go beyond the state of the art. Contrary to their popular characterization as intellectual conservatives, engineers are really among the avant-garde. They are constantly seeking to employ new concepts to reduce the weigh and thus the cost of their structures, and they are constantly striving to do more with less so the resulting structure represents an efficient use of materials. The engineer always believes he is trying something without error, but the truth of the matter is that each new structure can be a new trial. In the meantime the layman, whose spokesman is often a poet or writer, can be threatened by both the failures and the successes. Such is the nature not only of science and engineering, but of all human endeavors.”
As we’re creating these virtual structures… are we really taking the time to reflect on our failures? This is why some teams adopt practices like iteration retrospectives and post-mortems.
I’ll end this with a few questions, which I hope that you’ll share your experiences about…
- In what ways is your team embracing the failures of your development projects?
- How do you help manage your clients expectations… so that they too can plan for and embrace failure? Isn’t their new business venture on the web… likely to experience some failure?
We have so much to learn…
Poor Communication and IT Projects 1
InformationWeek has a short story titled, Poor Communications, Unrealistic Scheduling Lead To IT Project Failure.
“Communications failures top the list of reasons IT projects fail, according to poll results from the Computing Technology Industry Association.
About 28% of 1,000 respondents identified poor communications as the main cause of project failure, according to CompTIA, which offers project management training.”
So, while we’re all spending so much of our time focused on improving our technical skills, are we also investing our time into becoming communication superstars?
If you look back at the following posts, you’ll see some links to some excellent books on this topic.
Seth Godin on Dialogue 4
It appears that Seth Godin is catching on to the concept of Dialogue.
Seth writes, “Some organizations are good at listening. Some are good at talking. A few are even good at both.”
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how I listen to clients, employees, friends, and family. All of our relationships are a series of conversations. Sometimes we can have healthy dialogue, sometimes we just fall victim to debate. (see Dialogue vs Debate)
If you’re really interested in Dialogue, I’d encourage you to review the technology of Dialogue... and check out the Dialogue-Driven Development project and introduce yourself.
Please Make Fun of the Boss 3
While reviewing some articles related to small business management, I came across the following post… titled, Note From Boss to Employees, by Michael Wade. As a young business owner, who only 16 months ago was working in his attic… to now trying to figure out how to run a company with over ten employees (and growing), posts like this remind me that we all have so much to learn. :-)
Here are a few that I appreciated…
“I may not have been given a huge amount of training before being named to a supervisory position. As a result, I’ve had to learn through trial and error. That’s not always bad. Many of my responsibilities can only be learned through practice.”
Yep… that’s me! The only difference is that I promoted myself instead of being promoted by someone else. I’m still not sure what I got myself into sometimes. ;-)
“I will make mistakes. Please give me the same understanding that you’d like me to give you when you blunder.”
This reminded me of a blog post from last year, titled, Avoiding the most common software development goofs, which points out that things like ignorance and stress are often to blame for mistakes in development. I feel like these are reasons for goofs in just about any environment, especially business. Let’s face it. We’re not perfect and we’re going to make a lot of mistakes. Once we’ve agreed on this, let’s take the next step and see what happens.
“If I do something dumb or am on the verge of doing so, please tell me. Don’t hint. Tell me.”
Perhaps this is a common problem for most small business owners. Are employees afraid to tell me that I’m doing something dumb?
“If either of us has a problem with the other’s performance, let’s talk about it.”
As they say, real friends will be honest with you about your faults. Not because they want to make you look bad, but because they care.
Each of the points that I have listed here are pointing to is… healthier Dialogue, which is always a challenge to accomplish… in any relationship… whether with clients, coworkers, bosses, or employees.
I’d like to add a few to this list.
- It’s easier to ask for forgiveness, than to ask for permission.
- I’m still trying to get the hang of this GTD stuff, so.. you might remind me if I forgot something.
- Ask yourself on a regular basis, “Am I having fun?” If not, make time for some.
- Please make fun of the boss! :-)
Those that Tend the Store need Dialogue 3
I’ve been keeping my eye on a series of blog posts by Chad Fowler, which he calls The Big Rewrite.
Today, Chad posted an entry titled, Who’s Tending the Store? He writes…
“the experts keep the old system running while the new system is being built. So, who builds the new system? Not the experts, that’s who. Usually, it’s people like me: technology experts. And while we’re banging away at the existing system’s UI, trying to figure out what needs to be coded, the domain experts are doing their jobs. Unfortunately, this means the domain experts aren’t watching the Big Rewrite very closely. Regardless of how good the team, if communication is impaired between the domain experts and the technology experts, things are going to move slowly, and wrong software is going to be created.”
I wanted to follow up on this issue as it’s an area of great interest to me.
I feel like this issue runs deeper and while it’s important to be mindful of the communication between domain and technology experts, it’s a good idea for each of us to take a break every few days (or everyday) to assess our perceptions in all areas of the project. More specifically, I’m suggesting that in order for us to be effective in our communication, we must make time to refactor our perceptions about the state of a project. From the design, to the development, to team communication, to the schedule, and all the way to customer satisfaction… or what Martin Fowler calls, Customer Affinity. These things are not static and we must see them as extremely dynamic variables… much more dynamic than our wonderful language of choice.
When Brian Ford and I started discussing Dialogue-Driven Development (d3), we were initially focused on an area that always seems to come up in projects. Client communication. From managing expectations to delivering the right product, d3 has become an essential tool in our team’s tool belt. We refactored our entire Design and Development process (and it’s always evolving) to focus on the things that we felt were the most important to a successful project. Clients come to us in search of expertise and guidance so that we can build them innovative solutions. When it comes to this process, clients deserve simplicity.
For starters, we’re misguided
If there is one thing that I have learned, it is that our initial perceptions are often misguided. We have to work really hard to think critically, not only of the problem we’re trying to build a solution for, but also of how we, ourselves, are actually looking at the problem. It’s easy to fall victim to tunnel vision. I often find myself having to take a step back from problems on a very regular basis. While I have no scientific proof to back this, it seems to feels natural for us to keep firing once we pull the trigger. It’s important to re-aim.
Chad raises a very important topic and leaves readers to think about the problem. After thinking about this, it’s my opinion that in order for the domain and technology experts to be effective, they need healthy collaboration. But, I feel like this applies to many other areas of our process as well.
Is there even a problem?
So, what is the solution? Better yet, what is the problem? Is there even a problem?
How can we avoid situations where communication becomes impaired? We’ve all been there. We know how to spot impaired communication, but how can we spot it… before we perceive it as too late? How can we recover from it? What causes the communication to break down? What if… it were possible to repair the situation?
These questions don’t have easy answers. These are complicated problems that reach far beyond the development community. These are the same problems that all members of organizations, communities, countries, and planets all face, each and every day.
Take action!
While it’s important to make sure we’re engaging in healthy dialogue through a project, bad things will happen. They are inevitable. As Agilists, we’re accepting this as a fact of (project) life and should be prepared to take action. If you see communication being impaired, it’s time to step up and help the team out. Otherwise, you’re only hurting yourself… and your colleagues.
“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”—Mahatma Gandhi
If these sorts of topics are of interest to you, I encourage you to join the Dialogue-Driven community and help us figure this stuff out!
